Exhibitions

Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now

10am - 5pm

“Small wonders” The Guardian

“Many of the most exquisite contributions to this ambitious show can only be brought out of store once every ten years.” The Spectator

“This rare exhibition juxtaposes exquisite traditional miniatures from sacred and secular texts with modern and contemporary works they inspired, from sculpture to film and installation.” The Financial Times

Beyond the Page is curated by Hammad Nasar and Anthony Spira with advice from Emily Hannam.

The exhibition is organised by MK Gallery in partnership with The Box, Plymouth.

We are grateful for generous support from The Bagri Foundation and The Australia Council

and the Circle of Friends, chaired by Tarana Sawhney.

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Boyd & Evans: High Time

10am - 5pm

Events

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Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body

10am - 5pm

“There is a leakage, a seepage in these works. Many of them allude to bodies or systems that relate to bodies. Jealous bodies, broken bodies, fossilised bodies, vulnerable, contaminated bodies. There is also love, tenderness, glamour, and compulsion.” Jes Fernie Curated by Jes Fernie

Featuring: Saelia Aparicio, Alice Channer, Jesse Darling, Nicolas Deshayes, Kira Freije, Siobhán Hapaska, Nnena Kalu, Joe Namy, Harold Offeh, Ro Robertson and Vanessa da Silva

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Please be aware that this exhibition contains nude illustrations and some adult content. Please ask a member of staff if you would like more information. Trickster Figures is supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, essay by Francis Whorrall-Campbell supported by the Association for Art History. 

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Gilbert & George: The Rudimentary Pictures

Gilbert & George are two of the most important artists working in the world today and MK G* is the first public gallery in England to be built from scratch in 20 years. It is appropriate, therefore, to open MK G with a distinctive, important and high profile exhibition. Gilbert & George are also seen as radical and outside the establishment, in many of the same ways as Milton Keynes is seen in comparison with traditional British cities. Both can be viewed as bold, new and progressive. Gilbert & George: The Rudimentary Pictures, presents thirty-three new works, in which they explore such themes as alienation, sex, race, and human existence. Many of these striking pictures extend the distinctive range of images they have created exploring city life. In Gum City, City Sweat, Money City, Blood City, Piss City, Sex City and Crying City, backgrounds of London street plans are combined with map-like microscopic details of blood, sweat, tears, urine and semen, together with themselves. Speaking about The Rudimentary Pictures, Gilbert & George have said: “They deal with the thoughts and feelings that lie within us all and with the issues that confront us daily. Our cities, your tears, their money, the rain, our sexuality, your sweat, their views are all in The Rudimentary Pictures.” Commenting on exhibiting in Milton Keynes the artists said: “We are thrilled and touched that the Director, Stephen Snoddy has given us this opportunity to exhibit our new pictures in this exquisite gallery in Milton Keynes. The mere mention of the name Milton Keynes brings a smile of enthusiasm to the faces of our younger friends. It is very important that this young ‘Space Station’ of a city now has a building devoted to contemporary culture’. We are sure that it will be an exciting experience for everyone.” Gilbert & George are among the most important and original artists of our time. They met at St. Martin’s School of Art in 1967 and have been living and working together in London’s East End for over thirty years. From their unique beginnings as living and singing sculptures in the late 1960s they have created a vast range of distinctive pictures, which communicate honestly and directly with the viewer about aspects of contemporary society. Gilbert & George, who work as a single artist, have achieved international recognition with their exhibitions held world wide, including China, Russia, Europe and the USA. In 1986 they won the Tate Gallery’s prestigious Turner Prize award and their work is to be found in many national museum and gallery collections. The Rudimentary Pictures is their first exhibition in the U.K. since ‘The Naked Shit Pictures’ which were shown at the South London Gallery in 1995. *MK Gallery was branded MK G when it first opened.

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Mark Francis: Elements

Mark Francis (b.1962) is one of the ‘Young British Artists’ (YBAs) who came to prominence in the early 1990s, and his work is held in many public and private collections, including the Tate Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Saatchi Collection, London. This exhibition at MK Gallery was his first major solo exhibition in a public gallery in the U.K. The exhibition featured a surprising and intriguing mixture of exhibits; Francis’s abstract paintings were shown alongside antiquarian prints of birds eggs, shells, insects, fungi, medical dissections, diseases and natural history.  In addition there were maps, models of fungi and medical ephemera drawn from Francis’s extensive personal collection. This was the first time that Francis’s paintings and private collections had been brought together, affording a unique opportunity to consider the influences and contexts for his abstract work. Paintings made during the preceding seven years were shown in the Long Gallery, the largest of MK Gallery’s three exhibiting spaces. The walls of the Middle Gallery were densely packed  in imitation of the artist’s London sitting room with framed prints and other selected items which evoked the order in which Francis normally displayed his collections. The Cube Gallery featured four entirely new, previously unseen paintings,  which suggested a new direction in the artist’s work. Speaking of his collecting Francis said: Collecting has been a hobby since childhood, from football cards to model soldiers. For me it feels like some kind of impulsive ordering. By this I mean gathering information which seems to be intuitive but might not have a structured order at the time. It’s only through the accumulation of objects / prints that some sort of understanding and placement takes place. In my case the interest is natural history, medical images and astronomy, amongst other things. The way that I have presented the framed prints at home and at MK Gallery is to place them side by side so that they make some kind of grid-like amorphous form.  Each print tends to lose its own identity and you start to look at the constructed surface as a whole. This tends to echo elements within my paintings such as the “Compression” or “Growth” series.

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Richard Hamilton: New Technology and Printmaking

Thirty-one works by Richard Hamilton, one of the world’s most respected artists living today can be seen in the Long Gallery. Known as the “father of British pop art”, Hamilton (b.1922) has been making prints since 1939. His manipulation of painted and photographic images by computer means that his prints remain as innovative in conception and execution now as they have always been. The examples on view at MK G, made between 1964 and 1998, reveal his sophisticated and highly individual style. Hamilton will be at MK G on the evening of 30 March for a discussion about his work as part of the Artists in Conversation at MK G series.

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Printers inc.: Recent British Prints from the Arts Council and British Council Collections

Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin are among the artists included in the exhibition, printers inc. showing in the Cube Gallery (gallery 1), sponsored by Denton Wilde Sapte. This national touring exhibition from the Arts Council Collection, organised by the Hayward Gallery, presents 27 prints by 21 artists - some of Britain’s brightest young talents, working in the UK. The techniques used are diverse, ranging from woodcut to screenprint to letterpress. In addition, the ‘Habitat’, ‘Supastore’ and ‘Screen’ portfolios of recent British prints have been borrowed from the British Council to augment this rich and varied selection.

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Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2000

The prestigious annual New Contemporaries exhibition opens at Milton Keynes Gallery on Saturday 17 June. The exhibition, which is sponsored this year by Bloomberg, shows the work of thirty-three artists, selected by Time Out critic Sarah Kent, artist Gavin Turk, and independent curator Jeremy Millar, chosen from an original submission of over 1200 entries. It subsequently tours to Manchester and Edinburgh. Welcoming the exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery, Director Stephen Snoddy said: ‘I am delighted that MK G is the launch venue for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2000 exhibition. MK G is committed to bringing new audiences to new art. This exhibition offers the people of MK and the region the ideal opportunity to experience stimulating new work in a variety of media by some of the most promising artists currently emerging from fine art courses in the UK – without having to travel far.’ He went on to add, ‘Dealers, collectors, critics, curators and visitors enjoy coming to New Contemporaries exhibitions each year to talent spot possible art stars of the future. As the only venue for the exhibition in the South of England this year we expect to attract many visitors to MK from London and beyond.’ First established in 1949, (when it was known as Young Contemporaries), previous exhibitors have included many of the UK’s most prominent artists, such as David Hockney, Patrick Caulfield, and Turner Prize winners Damien Hirst, Gillian Wearing and Chris Ofili.

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Alison Turnbull: Houses into Flats

This exhibition by British artist Alison Turnbull (b.1956), comprised a series of twenty-eight paintings made over the preceding three years. Inspired by architectural plans, sections and elevations, the paintings featured diagrams of public and domestic buildings floating freely against coloured fields. The buildings, most of which Turnbull had never seen, were sourced from an eclectic range of books, maps and the internet. Through her technique of layering and repeatedly abrading the surfaces of her paintings, Turnbull subjected each architectural blueprint to a kind of archaeology. Subjects included a town hall, chapel, villa, apartment, lighthouse, factory, bank, and asylum. Turnbull likened the series to building an imaginary town or evoking the activities and rituals that make up a life. Alison Turnbull's wall work Moon is one of the site-specific commissions that was made for Milton Keynes Theatre Foyer, immediately next door to Milton Keynes Gallery, funded during the construction of the building by the Percent for Art scheme.

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Layla Curtis

Layla Curtis might be likened to a cartographer, but her maps are painstakingly produced and more a commentary on mapping than useful depictions of locations. For the exhibition at MK G she will be making use of sea, road and various world topographical maps, collaged into intriguing hybrid pieces. Some of them are specifically influenced by the grid format of Milton Keynes, one of them turning MK into a rectangular island surrounded by the sea. Another new work is a framed text piece, Index (Everywhere I’ve ever been), presented like a hoax index to an atlas, incorporating only the places Curtis has been to in her lifetime. Curtis recently said of her work: ‘Travelling has always been an integral part of my life. Like most people I rely on and trust maps to find my way, locate myself and plan journeys. By dissecting, dismembering and collaging maps to create new, hybrid maps, I aim to explore the effects of disturbing this trusted system of mapping.’ (Interview with Mike Dawson, Flux magazine, April 2000). With the world political map in constant flux, Curtis’s work invites us to consider such issues as disputed borders, international relations, unions, conflicts, internationalisation and globalisation.

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Richard Wright

For his solo show in MK Gallery's Cube Gallery, Richard Wright (b.1960) made a specifically commissioned wall drawing.  The drawing referenced seating in the adjacent MK Theatre, which opened at the same time as MK Gallery in October 1999, Wright's drawing process falls between action painting and site-specific installation. His approach is meticulous and usually of a symmetrical design but the final drawing results from what happens in situ; its execution becomes a live event. Though hand made, his flat emblematic images look mechanically produced. The use of gouache brings areas of intense colour that look as if they have been printed onto the gallery wall. Wright tends to use simple geometric forms that focus on the connections between art, design and architecture. The style of popular culture is interspersed with emblematic forms that are linked to modernist paintings and also graphic designs like tattoos and corporate logos. This blending of imagery is integrated with the physical architecture to create a temporary work of art that will remain only as a visual memory for the viewer.

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Conversation: An Exhibition of Figurative Sculpture

Conversation is an intriguing exhibition of twenty-two figurative sculptures in a variety of media, mostly by well-known British contemporary artists, such as Tony Cragg, John Davies, Antony Gormley, Julian Opie and Marc Quinn, but it also includes some unexpected pieces, such as a 3rd century BC painted terracotta figure and a 20th century wooden Lobi Shrine Figure from Ghana. Selected by the Gallery's Director Stephen Snoddy, the sculptures will be displayed in such a way as to invite visitors to see how the works might ‘speak’ to each other, and consider how to interpret the ‘conversations’ established between them. The arrangement or configuration of the sculptures is, therefore, just as important as the individual works, with the exhibition acting as one large tableau. In what might be termed a game of ‘musical statues’, the sculptures will change positions at least once during the exhibition, to allow different conversations or readings to be found between the works. The gallery’s free guided tours on Wednesdays and Sundays will be used to invite visitors to engage with the displays, by encouraging them to identify these possible ‘conversations’ for themselves. The exhibition offers visitors the chance to see a selection of figurative sculpture by some of the country’s best-known contemporary artists. It contributes to the discussion on the continuing development of figurative sculpture and offers the opportunity to consider such themes as private communication and human exchange, silence and darkness, life and death, the inner self and the outside reality. There is no catalogue for the exhibition but each work will be accompanied by an extended wall text.

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